


yorick

by cosmoscorpse



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: AU, Gen, Low Chaos, death to the empress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 19:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9563753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse/pseuds/cosmoscorpse
Summary: The skull feels lighter in her hands than it should be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posted from [my tumblr](http://seaborgois.tumblr.com)

The chapel is a ruin when Emily gets to it; the air is choked with the noxious fumes of paint pigments and the wet rot of kelp. The darkness is thick, barely lit only by a few sporadic candles.

There is a tree growing up from the center of the room, where she remembers the Strictures being displayed. She closes the door carefully behind herself and blinks at it, a sick, uneasy feeling taking hold of her chest. The tree looms before her, the bark dark and gnarled. It looks old. It cannot be.

_Do you like it_? the Heart asks, breathless glee in its tone.  _She worked for tireless nights and nights on it. Still, it pales in comparison to what she is making now. You should go and see._

“Be silent,” she mutters, skirting around the trunk carefully, moving to the tables at the far wall, the papers strewn there. She can feel the magic choking the room – a more concentrated dose of what lies over the Tower itself. It makes it more difficult to breathe, a low and aching pull on her bones, like whalesong. “How did she do this?”

The Heart cackles, and Emily shuffles through the papers on the table, holding them one by one up to the dim light coming off the closest candle. Some are scribbled drawings, diagrams; others are covered with what must be Delilah’s hasty scrawl. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle, and she shivers, the paper crackling in her hand. In bits and pieces, she begins to understand.

_Is it not beautiful?_  the Heart sighs, purring happily.  _Her masterpiece: The World as It Should Be._

“It can be stopped,” Emily bites back. The magic Delilah has planned is powerful, and would twist the whole of creation to her will; but it is a thing of delicate balance. Her sketches show a very specific arrangement of bone runes, and her notes make it clear that if even one more is added –

It would be stopped. It might be enough, even, to turn it against her.

Delilah might not have to die.

_What are you doing?_  the Heart hisses at her, a note of unease creeping into its voice. Emily stands in the gloom of the chapel, a void-borne tree growing out of the stones at her back, and she will not lie: the thought of ending the way without killing more than is absolutely vital is – appealing. And it is crafty, too, to turn Delilah’s own work against her.

(She thinks her father would approve.)

Her mind made up, she turns to the business of making the rune itself. Delilah’s notes had been cryptic but thorough; the process seems to be a simple one – if grim – and not entirely unlike the charms she’d learned to carve in Karnaca.

_What are you doing?_ the Heart says again, the panicked note growing louder.

The key difference seems to lie in material: Delilah’s runes require human bone. The notes had been very firm in that – whalebone did not resonate at the right harmony.

There is a skull on the other side of the chapel, the bone picked clean, white and gleaming. Emily picks it up gingerly, her heart in her throat.

It is –  _twisted_ , for Delilah to use human bones for her magic. Feels fundamentally profane for Emily to even  _consider_  doing the same, but – the magic must be undone. The skull grins emptily up at her. Its lower jaw is missing, as are some of the teeth. It feels lighter in her hands than it should be.

“I am sorry,” she tells it, speaking past the knot in her chest. She turns to reach for the pigments, setting the skull down on the table. There’s nothing to be done about it now – but when this is finished she’ll see to it that the bones are dealt with properly; if the remains can be identified they will be, and then they will be laid to rest.

The Heart starts to laugh, a slow and dark chuckle.

_Ohhh, how clever she was!_ it purrs,  _She found a use for him after all!_

Emily’s breath stops up in her lungs. The skull grins, the bone gleaming, and she feels ice creeping up her spine.

“What?” she breathes.

_Bone or stone, stone or bone – yes, I can see it now, he was taking up such **space** , _the Heart sighs.  _She might have taken the Mark from his skin, but there was still so **much**  magic left in his bones._

Understanding dawns on her and steals the strength from her limbs. She falls to her knees in the chapel and stares unblinking into the empty gaze of–

“No,” she says, her face feeling numb, her heart  _aching_ –

The Heart cackles.

_Tell me, dearest niece, do you still recognize him?_


End file.
